The factory quotas are fulfilled – yet the stores have nothing to sell.

The stores have nothing to sell – yet people’s homes are full of stuff.

People’s homes are full of stuff – yet no one is happy.

No one is happy – yet the voting is always unanimous.

Already in America I discovered that most of my old Soviet jokes didn’t work in translation. It wasn’t so much the language difference as the fact that Americans had no first-hand knowledge of a totalitarian government, ideological uniformity, and shameless propaganda.
But that is changing. The more America “progresses” back to the Soviet model, the more translatable the old Soviet jokes become.

Let’s see how an old Soviet joke can be rewritten into a new American joke.

The six contradictions of socialism in the United States of America

America is capitalist and greedy – yet half of the population is subsidized.

Half of the population is subsidized – yet they think they are victims.

They think they are victims – yet their representatives run the government.

Their representatives run the government – yet the poor keep getting poorer.

The poor keep getting poorer – yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

They have things that people in other countries only dream about – yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

There’s more where it came from – or where we’re going, whichever the case may be.

Americans have narrowly voted to reelect a president who will continue policies that will — not may — eventually lead to the downfall of the American republic.

The Tuesday election was a crushing defeat for the Tea Party-energized conservative movement but as a wise person once said, all defeats in politics are temporary. It is unfathomable to many Americans that a man they see as a wrongheaded, arrogant, corrupt Chief Executive could be reelected in a harsh economic climate, but as we saw with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 win during the Great Depression, it can happen.

For the time being I’ll leave it to others to hold forth on how best to take on the still-expanding Leviathan that President Obama is piloting but now that some of the initial pain and shock from Tuesday evening is beginning to wear off, let’s take a look at the grim future America faces if it fails to correct its course.

The economy is a shambles and thanks to the news-suppressing Obama-worshipping media, a huge chunk of the populace seems unaware of just how rotten things are. A quick recap: More than 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work. The workforce participation rate is the lowest in 30 years. Annual household income is down $4,000. A record 47 million people are on food stamps. The national debt is now an astonishing $16.4 trillion and it’s probably going to shoot up even more.

This is just a smattering of the deeply depressing economic statistics that define the age of Obama.

The President’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has zero authority to regulate the Internet – because the Internet exists in law at the FCC under Title I. Meaning the Commission can’t touch it.

So what does President Obama have waiting in the wings for when his Net Neutrality power grab is thrown out?

Meaning – again, without any legal authority whatsoever – President Obama will move the Internet from Title I to Title II. Title II is how the FCC over-regulates landline telephone lines – you know, that bastion of innovation lo these last seventy-plus years. Title II opens up the Pandora’s Box of uber-regulation of the Internet. But wait – there’s more.

Israel will not hesitate to launch a major IDF operation against Gaza-based terrorist factions if necessary, Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned on Sunday – after some 100 rockets hit southern Israel in 24 hours.

The Obama administration announced Friday it will put a large swath of western lands –1.6 million acres — off limits to oil shale and oil sands leases that hold the potential to develop more than a trillion barrels of oil.

If your organization has a policy or practice that doesn’t benefit minorities equally, watch out: The Obama administration could sue you for racial discrimination under a dubious legal theory that many argue is unconstitutional.

President Obama intends to close “persistent gaps” between whites and minorities in everything from credit scores and homeownership to test scores and graduation rates.

His remedy — short of new affirmative-action legislation — is to sue financial companies, schools and employers based on “disparate impact” complaints — a stealthy way to achieve racial preferences, opposed 2 to 1 by Americans.

Under this broad interpretation of civil-rights law, virtually any organization can be held liable for race bias if it maintains a policy that negatively impacts one racial group more than another — even if it has no racist motive and applies the policy evenly across all groups.

The White House is pulling a tactic out of its campaign playbook – and President Obama’s own community organizing past – using the organs of government to enlist average Americans to help Obama advocate for his priorities.

In an email sent to people who signed up to receive official updates from the White House, recipients are told to forward the message to their friends, asking them to help promote what is in effect White House propaganda. The White House email list, which government officials began compiling earlier in Obama’s term, is separate from the famed Obama campaign email list, but recipients are nonetheless being asked to engage in partisan political activity.

The email, sent out Friday, presents a video of Obama in the East Room earlier the same day making his case as negotiations with Republicans are set to begin on the budget stalemate that could lead to massive spending cuts known as “the fiscal cliff.”

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mitt Romney on Tuesday received ZERO votes in 59 Philadelphia voting divisions! ZERO!

It’s one thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to dominate a Democratic city like Philadelphia, but check out this head-spinning figure: In 59 voting divisions in the city, Mitt Romney received not one vote. Zero. Zilch. […]

On Wednesday, I added up Obama’s margin in a few key states, to get a sense of just how agonizingly short the Romney campaign finished from 270 electoral votes.

Some of those straggling precincts have reported, and so here is an updated set of numbers, according to the results this morning on the New York Times’ results map:

Florida: 73,858

Ohio: 103,481

Virginia: 115,910

Colorado: 113,099

Those four states, with a collective margin of, 406,348 for Obama, add up to 69 electoral votes. Had Romney won 407,000 or so additional votes in the right proportion in those states, he would have 275 electoral votes.

Allen West supporters expressed shock in Fort Pierce on Sunday, but not because the finally tally in St. Lucie County’s Congressional District 18 race showed West gaining 201 more votes — but because it was only based on a “cherry picked” partial recount and the supervisor refused to explain why.

Despite the persistent questions over fairness and accuracy, county attorneys, the county canvassing board and Elections Supervisor Gertrude Walker refused to answer questions from the campaigns or the press throughout the entire exercise. When the machine count was finished, elections officials announced the total and immediately had a sheriff’s deputy instruct everyone to leave.

As we got increasingly closer to the 2012 general election, it was my assertion that Obama would not be re-elected without employing widespread fraud of one form or another. Given the character of the Obama campaign, I took it for granted that fraud would be rampant, but the extent to which it might affect the election was then unknown. Now, at a week out from the election, there are still US congressional races that remain in question, and voter turnout numbers that just don’t add up. From counties across America showing well over 100% voter turnout, to precincts reporting 99% voter turnout for Obama, to military ballots being delayed or destroyed in plane crashes, to the illegal ejection of Republican inspectors from polling places, and much more, we have scenarios that would have every Democrat operative in the country screaming from the rooftops if the shoe was on the other foot.
Now, it appears that Americans are being asked to presume that Obama “would have won anyway.”

After the election, we moved on – almost too quickly – to discussions of immigration reform, and subsequently the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, ostensibly over an extramarital affair, but also in the wake of the Benghazigate, which reeks of criminality on the part of the Obama administration. It is a shame that such a renowned military man is being brought down over a lurid scandal that might have threatened national security, but what’s really surprising is not that Petraeus resigned when he did, but that he isn’t getting fist bumps from Obama cabinet members in public for being such a stud.

The pre-election data simply did not point to such a decisive win for Obama. Cyberspace is awash in verifiable reports of polling place and fraud complaints, as well as inordinate voter turnout. I don’t doubt for a nanosecond that technical tampering would be beneath this administration either, and with Obama’s affinity for technology, his connections in the high-tech industry, and available government resources, such tampering would have been child’s play.

Where are our elected officials? Must we storm Capitol Hill and wake up our representatives? Are they going to force us to turn to mob rule? I’m ready.

I’m reading about massive voter fraud and I’m not reading one word about anyone in the Republican party willing to do one thing about it.

Obama is not a legally elected president. The evidence is overwhelming. What the hell is happening? What has happened to our DNA? Our pedigree dictates that we do not take oppression kindly. Has that gone the way of the buggy whip?

Despite the filter of a hopelessly corrupt media, huge numbers of Indiana citizens saw through the Obama ruse.

In this unproductive week of finger pointing and teeth gnashing, I am prepared to argue that Indiana tells us potentially more about America’s future than Ohio.

In the week before the election, I was invited to speak at my alma mater, Purdue University. As I drove around West Lafayette, what caught my eye was the absence of Obama signs. I did not see one, not even in the faculty neighborhoods. As Obama’s unpopularity grew during the last four years, his team at some point decided to concede Indiana. From their perspective, Indiana lacked one tactical asset that Ohio had — early voting.

Early voting is a boon for the vote harvesters. The vote harvester’s mission is to gather unthinking collectives of potential voters — nursing home residents, college students, skid-row dwellers, recent immigrants — and get them to vote. Harvesting does not necessarily mean fraud, but it clearly encourages the same. In James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas videos, we saw how easy it was for even a congressman’s son — in this case, Pat Moran, son of Jim — to cross the line from harvesting to cheating.

Early voting makes harvesting all the more economical. Fewer people on the ground can get more accomplished. At an Obama rally at Ohio State, my friends in Columbus tell me, the Obama campaign provided a steady stream of busses to take rally-goers right to the polls, one stop shopping.

As reported on these pages, the Obama campaign in Ohio also bussed in gaggles of Somalis, who were given slate cards and told who to vote for. These people may or may not have been citizens, but they clearly had less idea what they were doing at the polls than the students, and that take some doing.

As I wrote would happen, Mitt Romney tried to blur lines with Barack Obama. He did not defend social conservatism, but let those attacks go unanswered. He did not articulate strong fiscal conservatism and he never repudiated Romneycare, thereby failing to make any credible attacks on Obamacare.

Conservatives and conservative institutions who embraced him early on are now scrambling to make excuses. They were so invested in a failure they cannot bring themselves to admit Mitt Romney and his campaign were failures. They were, to Republicans, what green energy is to Barack Obama.

Because these conservatives cannot accept that they were wrong, they must conclude that conservatism itself is somehow broken.

Mitt Romney out-performed eleven out fifteen of the Republican Senatorial candidates, and the four that he didn’t out-perform were from very blue states that Republicans never win. . . .
In other words, if the problem was that Romney was a weak candidate (and the Republican brand was in good shape), then those numbers would be flipped the other way around. What the numbers tell us is that Mitt Romney performed well in those states in spite of the Republican brand–not because of it (people who came out to vote against Akin still voted for Romney).

***

When I say that people weren’t “task-oriented or mission-focused,” I refer among other things to people who let their leftover disgruntlement from the GOP primary campaign distract them from the key task of 2012: Defeat Barack Obama at all hazards.

Look: Mitt Romney wasn’t my dream candidate. I went all-in for Herman Cain and, when that campaign ended, I went all-in for Rick Santorum, because I saw them as best positioned to stop Mitt from becoming the “It’s His Turn” nominee. But once the alternatives were eliminated, I put aside my dissatisfaction and got in step. (See my May 7 column, “Mitt’s Men Don’t Plan to Fail,” which includes a few sharp hindsight ironies.) Meanwhile, however, there were devotees of various failed Republican primary challengers who couldn’t turn loose of the anti-Romney arguments they had parroted for months, and who continued bitch, bitch, bitching all the way to November.

If selfishness and stupidity are “True Conservative” principles — if an unwillingness to engage in broad-based coalition politics is celebrated as a virtue — then we are truly doomed. Puerile gestures and egocentric bullying are incompatible with effective teamwork. To borrow a phrase from Elbert Hubbard, “Get Out or Get In Line.”

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) hit the nail on the head on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday: “I don’t think it’s about the Republican Party needing to become more moderate. I really believe it’s the Republican Party becoming more modern. And whether it’s Hispanics, whether it’s women, whether it’s young people, the Republican Party has to make it a priority to take our values, take our vision to every corner of this country, to every demographic group.”

She is 100% correct. Every time I suggest better, smarter GOP outreach to young people, Hispanics, African Americans, and women, many in the GOP old guard wave their pointer fingers at me and insist that I am advocating pandering, that I am allying myself with the Left’s divide and conquer tactics.

Let me correct them in writing, as I have done in speech: Outreach is not pandering. They are completely different things. I am not talking about dividing the country up into special interest groups, pandering to voting blocs with speeches telling them what they want to hear in order to win votes. What I am talking about is taking the conservative message, a message that stands to benefit everyone in society, to places the GOP often ignores–local African-American and Hispanic church groups, feminist centers, and left-leaning college campuses, to name a few.

Will your message face resistance? Yes, and that’s okay. It gives you a chance to correct false, media-driven stereotypes about conservatives and conservatism. Will you convert the majority in one afternoon? Of course not; these stereotypes have been inculcated over decades. Opening hearts and minds is a process, not a lunch appointment. That doesn’t mean you don’t get to work. Andrew Breitbart understood that better than anyone.

I tend to agree with Jedediah, but the main challenge for conservatives continues to be the ObamaMedia which shamelessly covered (up) for the Obama administration from 2008-present. The “branding” problem for Republicans is mostly the result of left-wing demagoguery that the MSM was more than happy to disseminate — Republicans want to ban (or limit access to) contraceptives. Republicans (as a group) want to outlaw abortions in cases of rape and incest. Republicans hate Hispanics and black people. None of those things are remotely true, but a huge portion of Obama voters believed it. So, yes – a certain amount of “outreach” to liberal leaning low info types is necessary in order to get around the Democrat media complex’s incessant propaganda.

President Obama has won reelection, and his administration has asked state officials to decide by Friday, November 16, whether their state will create one of Obamacare’s health-insurance “exchanges.” States also have to decide whether to implement the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid. The correct answer to both questions remains a resounding no.

State-created exchanges mean higher taxes, fewer jobs, and less protection of religious freedom. States are better off defaulting to a federal exchange. The Medicaid expansion is likewise too costly and risky a proposition. Republican Governors Association chairman Bob McDonnell (R.,Va.) agrees, and has announced that Virginia will implement neither provision.

LINCOLN – The re-election of President Barack Obama may ignite a showdown with Catholic leaders over a federal mandate that religiously affiliated charities, universities and hospitals provide birth control coverage to their employees.

“The Catholic Church is not going to back down,” said Denver Auxiliary Bishop James Conley, who will start as the new bishop of the Lincoln Diocese on Nov. 20. “We are never going to compromise our principles. We will defy it and face the consequences.”

I’m second to none in my avocation as a doomsday prophet who thinks the national debt will soon destroy us, but our highest priority right now should be economic growth. We need jobs, investment, and big-ticket business spending. It’s funny how the Democrats always convince the public to view the deficit as a vague, abstract nuisance when they want to spend money, but it becomes a doomsday asteroid poised to land on a bus full of orphaned children when the discussion turns to tax increases. In this case, Job One really should be jobs – created not with debt-busting pork barrel “stimulus” spending, but tax cuts and other pro-growth policies. That would create additional tax revenue that would alleviate pressure from the deficit, while we hammered out deals to restore balance to our federal budget (and, you know, actually write a federal budget, for the first time in the Obama era.) The very last thing we should do is drop tax bombs on job creators.

So if Boehner and his team are going to put some tax increases on the table, perhaps by eliminating deductions more than raising rates, they should learn from past mistakes a drive a truly hard bargain. Make the spending cuts immediate, not a load of cold porridge about $X of cuts happening over ten years, eight of which will never come. The opening bid should be small revenue increases for big fiscal restraint, something on the scale of giving Obama his silly “Buffett Rule” millionaire surtax in exchange for a balanced budget.

And let’s hope the Speaker and the rest of the Republican negotiators are smart enough to propose revenue increases that will hurt liberals the most. Start by taxing the ever-loving crap out of Hollywood. I’ve suggested this before, and the esteemed Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, was on the same wavelength last August when he suggested bringing back the 20 percent excise tax on motion picture gross revenue from the 1950s.

“The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two,” Reynolds recalled. ”Deficits are high again, and there’s already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like. But in these financially perilous times, why should movie stars and studio moguls, with their yachts, swimming pools and private jets, not at least shoulder the burden they carried back in Harry Truman’s day – when, to be honest, movies were better anyway.”

As Reynolds noted, one side effect of such proposals is that it causes far-Left Hollywood types to suddenly begin babbling about the depressing effects of high tax rates upon economic growth, as though they had been suddenly possessed by the ghost of Milton Friedman. That’s fun even if the tax proposals end up getting defeated. Especially now that we have YouTube to disseminate and immortalize their panicked bursts of “trickle-down economic” wisdom.

Barack Obama isn’t exactly famous for his loyalty; he has a history of jettisoning people once they’ve outlived their usefulness to him. This time, it’s the gay community.

On Friday, Obama told an MTV audience that he would not fight for gay marriage his second term, intoning that “it would be up to future generations of Americans to implement meaningful reform.”

Here’s the kicker; realizing that some states are now endorsing gay marriage, Obama suddenly became a champion of states’ rights, asserting, “For us to try to legislate federally into this area is probably the wrong way to go.”

When the states endorse Obama’s positions, he’s a states’ rights guy. When they don’t, he runs roughshod over them with the federal government.

Here we go again. The GOP got a drubbing on Election Day. But instead of talking about the poisonous effects of identity politics, economic illiteracy, the government school monopoly, and the Right’s woeful competitive disadvantage in mainstream American culture, the usual pandering suspects — led by GOP Sen. Lindsey Grahamanesty — have resurrected illegal alien amnesty-mania.

My work on illegal immigration, border security, and national security began as an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Daily News in 1992, where I first bore witness to the Balkanization wrought by open-borders multiculturalists. Invasion, published in 2002, documented how systematically lax enforcement of our immigration laws combined with suicidal political correctness paved the way for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

GOP “moderates” and strategists assume that waving the magic amnesty wand and opening up the welfare/entitlement state to generations of illegal immigrants will translate into electoral gains for the party. They’re deluded. They pretend amnesty will come at no cost to legal immigrants and native-born Americans. They pretend they can “secure the border first” by making the same empty, token gestures that have left our borders a bloody joke for decades.

The promise of “securing the border first” is a Kabuki compromise.

These GOP amnesty-peddlers are as deluded now as they were in 2007 when Bush/McCain/Kennedy spearheaded a failed amnesty campaign. They’ve learned nothing.

Diane Feinstein is outrageously outraged nobody told her. Seems a lot of people keep secrets in Washington these days. Sure, maybe people should have been told before the election, but it’s not like that would have made any difference.

The new accounts of the events that led to Mr. Petraeus’s sudden resignation on Friday shed light on the competing pressures facing F.B.I. agents who recognized the high stakes of any investigation involving the C.I.A. director but who were wary of exposing a private affair with no criminal or security implications. For the first time Sunday, the woman whose report of harassing e-mails led to the exposure of the affair was identified as Jill Kelley, 37, of Tampa, Fla.

Some members of Congress have protested the delay in being notified of the F.B.I.’s investigation of Mr. Petraeus until just after the presidential election. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that her committee would “absolutely” demand an explanation. An F.B.I. case involving the C.I.A. director “could have had an effect on national security,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think we should have been told.”

The resemblance between the Obama administration’s national security policy and a soap opera is purely coincidental:

The FBI was investigating harassing emails sent by Petraeus biographer and girlfriend Paula Broadwell to a second woman. That probe of Broadwell’s emails revealed the affair between Broadwell and Petraeus. The FBI contacted Petraeus and other intelligence officials, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asked Petraeus to resign. A senior U.S. military official identified the second woman as Jill Kelley, 37, who lives in Tampa, Fla., and serves as an unpaid social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where the military’s Central Command and Special Operations Command are located. Staffers for Petraeus said Kelley and her husband were regular guests at events he held at Central Command headquarters. . . .

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the U.S. military “did everything they were in position to do” about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

In a letter and timeline sent to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Panetta said the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate and nearby annex in Benghazi were over before U.S. forces could arrive.

Now the lies are so painfully bad you know they’re just depending on the fact that the Obamamedia will let them get away with it and most Americans aren’t paying attention, anyway.

Jennifer Griffin at FOX News today confirmed that the US was holding prisoners at the Benghazi annex near the consulate compound. US agents handed three prisoners over to Libyan authorities on their way out of the city on September 12. The prisoners may have been held in the compound for several days.

Makes the attempts to blame the YouTube video all the more sinister. They knew damn well what this was about.

One thought on “Monday Morning Ketch-up: Time to Recycle the Old Soviet Jokes”

Traditionally most Presidencies run into difficulties during their second terms. I cannot remember any of them carrying over as much baggage as this one, before the very first vote was cast. Just any single issue that now haunts this President would’ve sunk any other candidate running for a second term.

The lawlessness and contempt that this administration has demonstrated throughout their first term for the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law is quite obvious even to a untrained eye. Coming from the administration that promised the most “transparent” administration ever. That has never happened and yet it never factored into election as a major issue for a majority of voters.

They played Lucy and Charlie Brown over Benghazi and put forth bogus theories regarding the actual cause. Then apprehended and imprisoned a citizen over expressing their Constitutional Rights of Free Speech. Then the President and the Secretary of State produces a commercial message and had it broadcasted it in Muslim Countries denying responsibility for the video and apologizing for any harm and our Free Speech Rights. Then as if any of these scandals weren’t enough, just within days of the election we start to learn that there were many more scandals and coverups yet to come. Iranians shooting at our unmanned Drone in international air space. Announce that they put 1.4 million acres of land off limits to energy production two days after the election. A possible National Security Risk of CIA Director General Petraeus that they knew of and took no action for months. For pure political reasons. . . . self preservation and against all interests of the American people. Then after a one hour photo op with Governor Crico in New Jersey nothing was done with any degree of competence to help the victims of super storm Sandy. We are now two weeks after the storm and thousands of people don’t even have basic power and necessities. If Rudy and Pataki were still in office there would be screams to have their heads, instead . . . . . . crickets..

It’s going to be a long, miserable, scandal riddled four years to come and it hasn’t even begun yet.